Notes on Color - Goethe1

(from 17) The rising or setting sun appears to make a notch on the horizon.

(from 130) Objects are often seen by sick persons in variegated colours.

(135 in toto) Lastly, it is also worthy of remark, that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.

(from 147) White: “the simplest, brightest, first, opaque occupation of space.”

(from 754) Yet, how difficult it is to avoid substituting the sign for the thing; how difficult to keep the essential quality still living before us, and not to kill it with the word.

(763 in toto) In order to experience these influences completely, the eye should be entirely surrounded with one colour; we should be in a room of one colour, or look through coloured glass. We are then identified with the hue, it attunes the eye and mind in mere unison with itself. 

(851 in toto) The separation of light and dark in all appearance of colour is possible and necessary. The artist will solve the mystery of imitation sooner by first considering light and dark independently of colour, and making himself acquainted with it in its whole extent.

(from 863) If the artist abandons himself to his feeling, colour presently announces itself.

(915 in toto) It has been [circumstantially] shown, that every colour produces a distinct impression on the mind, and thus addresses at once the eye and feelings. Hence it follows that colour may be employed for certain moral and aesthetic ends.